Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes OverMIT Press, 12.10.2001 - 178 Seiten A poetic exploration of the new world created by the collision of the biological body with technology and culture. For more than 3,000 years, humans have explored uncharted geographic and spiritual realms. Present-day explorers face new territories born from the coupling of living tissue and metal, strange lifeforms that are intelligent but unconscious, neither completely alive nor dead. Our bodies are now made of machines, images, and information. We are becoming cultural bodies in a world inhabited by cyborgs, clones, genetically modified animals, and innumerable species of human/information symbionts. Ollivier Dyens's Metal and Flesh is about two closely related phenomena: the technologically induced transformation of our perceptions of the world and the emergence of a cultural biology. Culture, according to Dyens, is taking control of the biosphere. Focusing on the twentieth century—which will be remembered as the century in which the living body was blurred, molded, and transformed by technology and culture—Dyens ruminates on the undeniable and irreversible human/machine entanglement that is changing the very nature of our lives. |
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Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man : Technology Takes Over Ollivier Dyens Keine Leseprobe verfügbar - 2001 |
Häufige Begriffe und Wortgruppen
a-life artifacts artificial intelligence become biosphere Bodies without Organs brain Bruce Sterling Chapter clone cognitive completely contaminated Crater create Cruel Miracles cultural body cyberpunk cyberspace cyborg Dawkins define digital images disseminate doublethink dynamics ecosystem emergence entanglement environment evolution example exist extraterrestrial fact fiction film fundamental genes genetic global Gregor Samsa human body idea ideology immune system infection interactions Internet Joel Slayton Kafka Kevin Kelly Leonardo Less Alive levels of reality Lévy life-forms living body longer machines Malina manipulate memes memories Metal and Flesh Metaman Metamorphosis monsters Moreau Moreau's animals multiple mutations networks ontology organic Orwell Pamela Anderson phenomena phenomenon physical plastic body postmodernity realm replicators representations Reprogenetics Richard Dawkins Rise of Cultural Robocop Sacks's patients semiotic signs simulacrum specific spread strange structure suggests survival technological culture technological reality thing tion today's torture trans transformed understanding unstable virus viruses William Gibson Yucatán
Beliebte Passagen
Seite 32 - Man's very soul is due to the machines; it is a machine-made thing: he thinks as he thinks and feels as he feels through the work that machines have wrought upon him, and their existence is quite as much a sine qua non for his as his for theirs.
Seite 66 - Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined.
Seite 98 - A man, viewed as a behaving system, is quite simple. The apparent complexity of his behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which he finds himself.
Seite 105 - ... and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process...
Seite 28 - In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan, and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions. Perhaps the biosphere does not "like" the idea of five billion humans.
Seite 70 - Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that...
Seite 24 - What is it about the idea of a god which gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. The 'everlasting arms...
Seite 101 - It is said by some that our blood is composed of infinite living agents which go up and down the highways and byways of our bodies as people in the streets of a city. When we look down from a high place upon crowded thoroughfares, is it possible not to think of corpuscles of blood travelling through veins and nourishing the heart of the town ? No mention shall be made of sewers, nor of the hidden nerves which serve to communicate sensations from one part of the town's body to another; nor of the...